Entries in Apple TV
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Apple(NEW YORK) -- Steve Jobs said it many times: Apple TV, the company’s small TV add-on, was a hobby. Tim Cook, Apple’s current CEO, has used the same term over the last couple of months. But despite that, Apple TV has long been rumored to be more than a hobby — an actual HDTV or TV set with deeper features.

Now appears that the “hobby” has turned into an “intense interest” for the company. In an interview with NBC’s Brian Williams, Tim Cook has spoken a little bit more about the company’s TV plans — or at least implied that there are plans.

“When I go into my living room and turn on the TV, I feel like I have gone backwards in time by 20 to 30 years,” Cook told Williams. “It’s an area of intense interest. I can’t say more than that.”

That’s the most we’ve heard yet from Apple about its future plans for the TV space.

Cook didn’t elaborate, but perhaps Steve Jobs’ words give us the best idea of what Apple might be working on.

“The only way this is going to change is if you start from scratch, tear up the box, redesign and get it to the consumer in a way that they want to buy it,” Jobs said in 2008 at the AllThingsD conference.

And then from Walter Issacson’s biography of Jobs: “It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.”

Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Image(NEW YORK) -- Apple appears to be moving forward with its long-rumored plan to dive into the television market.

Citing people familiar with the matter, the Wall Street Journal reports the company has held talks in recent weeks with media executives at several large companies over its vision for the future of TV. The sources also told the newspaper that Apple is working on its own TV design that would allow users to access shows and movies through wireless streaming technology.

Describing the meetings, sources told the Journal that Apple has presented ways in which its technology could be used to recognize users across various platforms, like phones, tablets and TVs.

In at least one of those meetings, one source said, the company also mentioned future technology that might allow users to change TV channels with voice commands or movements.

Mike Ehrmann/WireImage(NEW YORK) -- In his final days, Steve Jobs told his authorized biographer, Walter Isaacson, that he was far from finished. One of the many technologies he planned to remake, he said, was your television.

Since Jobs had already reinvented communications (the iPhone), computing (from the Macintosh to the iPad), music (the iPod) and animation (Pixar), the tech world has been abuzz about a possible Apple TV since Isaacson brought it up.

In his book, Isaacson quotes Jobs: "'I'd like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,' he told me. 'It would be seamlessly synched with all of your devices and with iCloud.' No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. 'It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.'"

So what did he crack? Is there really something in the works?

Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray & Co., says yes. Like most Apple products, he predicts, it will be simple, sleek, all-purpose -- and it has the potential to change completely the way you use your TV.

"Imagine a 40- or 50-inch iPad," said Munster.

He said he envisions a system that understands voice commands, using Apple's new Siri virtual assistant, and spares you the trouble of fumbling with a clunky remote that always gets lost between the sofa cushions.

Munster said he's met with component suppliers in Asia, and "I think the inertia is behind it." Parts are not yet being manufactured, he said, but there could well be an Apple television "in late 2012 or early 2013."

Munster said it will only work, though, if content providers -- TV program producers, video game makers and the like -- recognize its potential and make use of it. If they do, he said, it could be a threat to cable TV providers and manufacturers such as Sony and Samsung.